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previous: Chapter 12 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Southern Indians by R. S. Cotterill University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma, 1954 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know!

 p231  XIII
Epilogue: The Last Stand
1825‑1830

After 1825 the history of the Southern Indians is limited to the epic and tragic theme of removal. The constant and unrelenting pressure by the United States warped all Indian relations; Indian resistance to removal determined practically all tribal actions. Their leaders were chosen because of their attitude toward removal, their councils deliberated only on the subject of removal. Removal was the focus of their thoughts, and the dread of it virtually paralyzed their lives.

From his predecessor, President Adams inherited not only the old problem of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, but also the new problem of the Seminoles. These were the only Florida Indians remaining in 1821, the other tribes having gradually attained extinction in the normal course of contact with the Spanish and British. The first of the Seminoles were Lower Creeks who in late colonial times had moved in to occupy the region left vacant since the involuntary departure therefrom of such Apalachees as had survived the Moore raid of 1704. Without loss of ancient identity they were frontiersmen. Miccosukee was their principal town, and to its chief the Seminoles usually paid that small measure of allegiance consonant with Creek practice. The Seminoles considered themselves a part of the Creek people, invariably supported them in war, usually attended their councils, and acknowledged,  p232 if they did not always respect, the authority of the Creek head chief. To their geographical detachment from the other Creeks had been added in 1795, a political cleavage, with the result of so increasing their already considerable spirit of independence that they became practically a separate tribe. As frontiersmen they gave sympathy, and some assistance, to the Red Sticks in the Creek war of 1814, and after the war gave refuge to those who had survived the onslaught of American craftiness and Cherokee valor. The virtue of this act was not divorced from necessity since the newcomers outnumbered the older Seminoles two to one. The entire tribe now numbered some five thousand people divided among fifteen or eighteen villages located for the most part between the Apalachicola and the Suwannee rivers. Miccosukee retained its primacy as the largest and most important town, but the head chief of the tribe was Neamothla, a Red Stick, whose residence was at Cohowofooche, near the present Tallahassee.⁠1

Because Florida was so vast, the Indian population so scanty, and white immigration so small, it would seem that there was little need for either removal or concentration. Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson, acting as governor, urged the United States to return the Red Sticks to Alabama and to concentrate the remainder of the tribe along the Apalachicola. Investigation, however, convinced the War Department that the Red Sticks would not return without war, and that the Apalachicola region, because of its fertility, was unsuitable for Indian occupancy. On September 18, 1823, the Seminole chiefs were induced, by a liberal application of the customary methods of persuasion, to accept a reservation in central Florida between Lake Okechobee and the Withlacoochee River.⁠2 In representing this region to the Seminoles as a place where they would be free from white encroachment, the commissioners spoke with complete, if unintentional, accuracy,  p233 since it was barren of game, swampy, frequently inundated, and incapable of cultivation.

Neamothla, after denouncing the reservation, signed the treaty which consigned his tribe to destruction, but permitted him and five other chiefs to remain on reservations along the Apalachicola. Government inefficiency and Indian reluctance combined to postpone for a year the removal of the Seminoles to their reservation. Whether from old habit or an illogical protest against the treaty he had signed, Neamothla permitted and perhaps encouraged his followers to drive off or kill the cattle and burn the houses of his white neighbors. An end was put to this pastime when Governor Duval in the summer of 1824 called out the militia, marched on Neamothla's town, overawed the Indians, and ordered the entire tribe to meet him as St. Marks the last of July. In a conference with the six hundred who actually came, Duval deposed Neamothla as head chief, appointed John Hicks in his place, and fixed October 1 as the date for beginning the removal.⁠3

Before the rear guard of the Seminoles reached the reservation, the vanguard began leaving it, having convinced themselves by actual inspection that their new home could profitably be utilized only as a cemetery. Promised government supplies failed to reach them, nothing edible could be gleaned from the reservation, and the starving Seminoles could maintain a feeble vitality only by breaking out of the reservation and subsisting on the cattle they could steal from the scanty white population of Florida. In these enterprises the Miccosukees, it is interesting to note, took a vigorous lead and by so doing regained the moral ascendancy they had previously lost to the Red Sticks. For the four years of Adams' administration the Seminoles continued to roam, hungry and desperate, over North Florida, returning to their reservation only when threatened by overwhelming force or allured by the infrequent arrival of government supplies.

While the Seminoles were engaged in mitigating, after their fashion, the misdemeanors of the Monroe Indian policy in Florida,  p234 their Creek kinsmen were intent on undoing the felony committed against them at Indian Springs. Only after President Adams had sent the treaty to the Senate and had seen it ratified did the evidence of its iniquity reach him in the form of condemning reports from Agent Crowell and General Gadsden, and indignant protests from the Creeks.⁠4 Unwilling either to condone a fraud or to exasperate the Georgians, the President undertook to obtain from the Creeks in a fair treaty the Georgia territory of which they had recently been so unfairly deprived. To this the Creeks, apparently prizing their property less than their pride, agreed; and in the treaty of Washington, January 24, 1826, they supposed they were surrendering, as Adams supposed he was obtaining, all the Creek land in Georgia. When it became evident that both were mistaken, an amendment to the treaty was adopted (March 3, 1826) to repair the error, but the new line still lay east of the Alabama boundary; and a third treaty, November 15, 1827, was required before the Creeks could divest themselves of the last remnant of those Georgia lands to which, since the time of Alexander McGillivray, they had so tenaciously clung.

The Creek dissensions resulting from the treaty of Indian Springs were lessened by Adams' policy of recognizing the Upper Creeks as the legal, because the largest, faction, and disappeared with the consequent migration of the McIntosh faction west of the Mississippi. But the now spiritually united nation experienced fresh exasperation from Alabama and Georgia, both of which insisted that the Indian Springs treaty was valid inasmuch as it had received Senate ratification. The Alabama legislature on January 11, 1827, extended the state jurisdiction over the Alabama region ceded in that treaty and forbade hunting and trapping therein by the Indians; the Georgia legislature authorized the survey of the entire Indian Springs cession even before the date fixed in the treaty. The Alabama courts, recognizing the validity of the Washington treaty, invalidated the legislative act,  p235 but Georgia persisted in her surveys in complete disregard of both Creek protests and Presidential prohibitions. The last public act of Little Prince, the aged head chief of the Creeks, was to drive off a party of Georgia surveyors.⁠5

While the United States was preoccupied with the Seminoles and Georgia with the Creeks, the Cherokees had experienced, if they had not enjoyed, a brief respite from troubles. The death in January, 1827, of Pathkiller, the head chief with a penchant for appeasement, left the tribal government in the hands of resolute, if not always judicious, men.⁠6 In March, 1827, they denied a cession of their North Carolina land and a right of way for a Georgia-projected canal to connect the waters of the Tennessee and the Coosa. Naïvely thinking they could forestall further demands for removal by presenting evidence of civilization, they decided to adopt a written constitution and to establish a national news­paper. On July 26, 1827, delegates from the various Cherokee towns in the four states met at New Echota and adopted a written constitution modeled closely upon that of the United States; the news­paper, the Cherokee Phoenix, issued its first number (in English and Cherokee) at New Echota on February 2, 1828.⁠7

The first effect of these cultural forays was a domestic rebellion; the second, a revival, or at least an intensification, of the controversy with Georgia. The first was a protest against the imitation of white civilization; the second, an answer to its alleged defiance. The rebellion was sponsored by Whitepath, a full-blood Cherokee councilor, who demanded the rejection of all white culture, Christianity included, and a return to primitive ways. It was, therefore, a feeble and belated echo of the Creek movement  p236 of 1814. John Ross, now head chief under the constitution, made short work of the uprising, which ended with the submission of Whitepath and the restoration of his forfeited seat on the council.⁠8

The horror expressed, and doubtless felt, by Governor Forsyth over the new Cherokee constitution was lacking in logic, since the Cherokees were no more of an entity under their constitution than before. But he sent the President a copy of the constitution with an accompanying protest from the Georgia legislature. To this Adams responded by instructing Agent Montgomery to secure, if possible, the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, and by sending two commissioners to assist him in his efforts to promote the emigration of Cherokee individuals.⁠9

President Adams, notwithstanding his opposition to Georgia practices, did not disapprove the principle of Indian removal. In October, 1826, he sent a three-man commission to the South to negotiate removal treaties with the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Choctaws, regarding a visit from a federal commission as somewhat in the nature of a hostile invasion, prepared their defenses by replacing their old chiefs with younger and more resolute men. Pushmataha, chief of the southern district, had died some years before and had been succeeded by Tupeau Homa. On the eve of the conference, the Choctaws of the northeastern and northwestern districts took the unprecedented action of deposing their old chiefs, Mushulatubbe and Robert Cole, and of electing in their place David Folsom and Greenwood LeFlore. These men were half-bloods well acquainted with white ways and wiles.

Instead of bringing to the conference the rank and file, who were all too susceptible to bribery and corruption, the new chiefs entrusted the conduct of the negotiations to a committee of thirteen whom they thought invulnerable to American pressure. To the commissioners' offer of $1,000,000 for their Mississippi territory, transportation to the West, and reservations in Mississippi for all preferring to remain under state jurisdiction, the committee of thirteen gave a firm, although not a unanimous, rejection, commenting that if they could not trust to an American guarantee of  p237 their present territory, they could not have faith in a guarantee of new lands. They also refused a cession of a small tract on the Tombigbee that the commissioners had been instructed to get in case their larger demands were refused. The commissioners, after deploring the absence of the Choctaw rank and file and expressing their amazement at Choctaw ingratitude, departed for the Chickasaws.

The Chickasaws laid the groundwork for their reception by decreeing that no Chickasaws could accept a private reservation and by success­fully insisting that the conference be held not at the agency but at the tribal council house. In the conference held after these precautions had been taken, they refused either to cede their lands or to send an exploring party to the West.⁠10

It was only by honoring his professions and completely ignoring his practices that the Southern Indians could expect from Jackson the justice they had experienced under Adams. Whatever may have been the hopes of the Indians, the advocates of removal felt that with the election of President Jackson in November, 1828, their hour of triumph had arrived. In order to render the Cherokees more receptive to the anticipated actions of the incoming President, the Georgia legislature on December 20, 1828, extended the state jurisdiction over all the land within the Georgia limits; in order to give Jackson time to act, the enforcement of the law was deferred until June 1, 1830.⁠11 Jackson justified the faith of Georgia by informing a delegation of protesting Cherokees through Secretary Eaton that he could not protect them against the Georgia laws and that their only course was submission or removal.

When the Cherokees returned home firm in their determination to do neither, the President on May 17 commissioned William Carroll, a special agent, to travel through the Cherokee and Creek country with the double objective of securing tribal cessions and individual migration.⁠12 Cherokee officials refused to treat with Carroll and also refused a second bid for their North  p238 Carolina lands. They likewise refused to accept the Georgia interpretation of a northern boundary for the Creek cession and had the unusual satisfaction of seeing their stand supported by Jackson's line commissioner, John Coffee.⁠13 These were Pyrrhic victories, for both Jackson and Georgia were determined on removal. Jackson in his annual message to Congress, December 8, 1829, asked that body to give removal the same legislative sanction it had long had from the executive. Eleven days later the Georgia legislature upheld his hands by enacting the first of a series of laws annulling all Cherokee laws, forbidding further meetings of their council or other assemblies within Georgia limits, declaring all contracts between white men and Indians invalid unless witnessed by two white men, making an Indian incapable of being a witness against a white man, providing for the survey and distribution of Cherokee land, and excluding the Cherokees from digging gold in the newly discovered gold fields in the Cherokee country.⁠14

The example set by the Georgia Act of 1828 was followed by Mississippi in February, 1829, with the enactment of a law declaring the Indian territory in the state subject to legal process. In September, 1829, the Choctaw agent, Ward, interrupted his embezzlement of Choctaw annuities long enough to urge the Choctaws to cede their lands and remove west. In November a special and less malodorous envoy, Major David Haley, was sent down with the same demand. Both propositions were promptly rejected by Folsom, chief of the northeastern district, speaking for the tribe. A break in the tribal will became evident in the winter of 1829, when LeFlore of the northwestern district visited Nashville on Jackson's invitation and, for reasons unrecorded, became a convert to the policy of removal.⁠15

On May 28, 1830, President Jackson approved a law of Congress providing for the removal of the Indians. The law had received  p239 only a bare majority over the strenuous opposition of Northern Congressmen whose solicitude for the Southern Indians was perhaps not divorced from an inclination to throttle the increase of a Southern white electorate. The law made removal inevitable; it marked the end of the trail for the Indians in the Southeast. To be sure, the law did not provide for compulsory removal; the Indians had the alternative of remaining in their homes on individual reservations, without tribal organization, subject to state jurisdiction. The governor of Georgia on July 3 declared in force the state laws previously made and deferred; Alabama in 1829 had annexed the Indian territory within the state limits and placed the Indians themselves under state jurisdiction; Mississippi in March, 1830, enacted a law providing that Indian chiefs presuming to perform their functions be subject to a fine of $1,000 and imprisonment for a year.⁠16

All the tribes except the Cherokees soon ceased to struggle. The badgered Creeks, bereft of leader­ship by the death of Little Prince, and seeing their lands increasingly appropriated by white intruders whom they were powerless to remove, sent to Washington a delegation which, on March 24, 1832, signed an agreement to remove. The Seminoles yielded on the following May 9. The Choctaws, after their other chiefs had resigned in fear of the Mississippi law, were influenced by LeFlore to accept removal in the infamous treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, October 28. The Chickasaws agreed on October 20. The Cherokees alone continued the contest, driving the intruders off their lands, removing their capital to Tennessee, and appealing to the Supreme Court of the United States for protection. These measures postponed but did not avert the final doom. On December 29, 1835, at New Echota in the absence of John Ross and other tribal officials, a few dissident chiefs were corrupted into signing a treaty of removal, which Jackson shamelessly utilized as an expression of tribal consent.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Indian Affairs, II, 408‑16.

2 Ibid., 429‑30. The journal of the commissioners makes the interesting suggestion that the predecessors of the Seminoles were Yemassees. It names the Seminole towns and their chiefs. Neamothla's town was twenty-three miles northwest of St. Marks. Neamothla appears in Angie Debo's The Road to Disappearance as Eneah Amarthla. Both forms are titles and not personal names.

3 Ibid., 619. Duval to Secretary of War, July 12, 1824. After his deposition as head chief of the Seminoles, Neamothla returned to Alabama and took an active part in Creek resistance.

4 Telamon Cuyler MSS. (University of Georgia) Indian Affairs, 1800—. Apothla Yahola and others to Secretary of War, December 16, 1825. These letters were probably composed and written by John Ridge, the Cherokee secretary of the Creek delegation.

5 Creek Indian Letters, 1813‑1829, pt. 3, 1110, 1111; ibid., 1112, Little Prince to Georgia Surveyors, January 12, 1827; ibid., 1115 id. to Troup, January 22, 1827; ibid., 1782‑1839, 109, Barbour to Troup, January 29, 1827.

6 Rachel Caroline Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, 54‑55. Pathkiller was succeeded by C. R. Hicks, who died about two weeks after Pathkiller's death. Then the government was administered by Major Ridge and John Ross until the meeting of the council, which made William Hicks principal chief with John Ross as second chief.

7 For an account of the constitution making and the establishment of the news­paper, see Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 112.

8 Ibid., 113; Eaton, op. cit., 113.

9 Royce, The Cherokee Nation, 241‑42, 258, 259.

10 Indian Affairs, II, 709‑27, journal of the commissioners William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee.

11 Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 117.

12 Royce, The Cherokee Nation, 259.

13 Telamon Cuyler MSS, Indian Affairs, 1780‑1830, Coffee to Gilmer, November 26, 1829; idem to Eaton, December 30, 1829.

14 Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 117. Gold was discovered in northern Georgia in 1828. For the resulting gold rush, see F. M. Green's "Georgia's Forgotten Industry: Gold Mining," Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. XIX, 93‑111, 210‑28.

15 Abel, op. cit., 370‑72.

16 Ibid., 371; Debo, op. cit., 97.

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